Settle the avans and release the guarantee retention

Take from the contract the size of the advance and what it may be spent on, the rate at which it is recovered from each act, the retention percentage, the event that releases it and how long it is held, together with any bank guarantee standing in place of either of them.

Why: These two terms are negotiated once and then govern every payment for years. A retention rate remembered wrongly is an error repeated monthly, and an advance recovery schedule that was never written down is how a contractor reaches the end of a job still owing an advance against acts that have all been paid in full.

Raise the advance invoice with the schet-faktura on it and book the receipt as a payment against it, and where the contract restricts what the money may be spent on, keep that restriction with the contract record. The balance still to recover is not a figure the ledger carries: keep it as the running total you deduct from on each act, starting from the advance received.

Why: An advance is not revenue, it is money held against work not yet done, and the only figure that matters day to day is how much of it is still outstanding. On state contracts an advance is often ring-fenced to particular expenditure and monitored through the treasury, so spending it elsewhere is a breach quite apart from whether the work eventually gets done.

Set the rate that applies to the advance and to each act, and check which date decides it in each case: the day the advance was received for the advance, the day the work was accepted for the act. Keep the earlier rate available for documents that belong to an earlier period.

Why: The standard rate became 22 percent on 1 January 2026, having been 20 percent before that. A contract running across the change carries both, and the tax charged on an advance received at the old rate does not become the new rate because the act is signed later. A system that only knows today's rate will quietly restate history and put the return out.

For every certified act, enter the retention on the invoice so the claim carries gross, retention and net, deduct the agreed share of the advance from what you claim and say so on the invoice, so the gross value, each deduction and the net payable read from one document. Carry the remaining advance forward so the next act starts from it.

Why: The set-off is the reason both sides can reconcile at all, because the client's ledger has to show the advance shrinking at exactly the rate yours does. Where the two disagree it is almost always because one side applied the percentage to a different base, the gross act or the act after retention, and that gap grows quietly every single month.

Send the net figure with the documents that support it and let the payment term run from the event the contract or the law names, which is the signing of the acceptance document rather than the day you got round to issuing the invoice.

Why: The deductions do not move the due date. On work under 44-FZ payment falls due within seven working days of the acceptance document being signed and interest on delay runs at a statutory rate, so the day the clock starts is the difference between a claim you can put a number on and a complaint you cannot.

Track the accumulated retention against its release conditions, completion of the works, the end of the guarantee period, defects actually closed out, and release it against the condition that has been met rather than against a date somebody remembered.

Why: Retention is money already earned and held back, and it is the balance most often forgotten on a finished job, because by the time it falls due the project team has moved to the next one. The condition that releases it is usually not a date at all, it is the closing of the last defect, which means somebody has to still be watching.

Assemble the statement from the invoices and payments on this contract, acts certified, advance received and recovered, retention withheld and released, tax at each rate and every payment made, then set it against the figures the client is carrying and have the two sides agreed and signed.

Why: A signed akt sverki is what closes the contract as a financial matter, and it is the document any later dispute starts from. Left unagreed, the two ledgers stay a few percent apart for years, and the difference is usually one deduction taken on the wrong base far enough back that nobody can reconstruct which month it was.